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by rbanffy
61 days ago
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Every place has good and bad, things you’ll like and identify with, things you’ll find fascinating, others you’ll find confusing, and a fair amount of hellscapes. The trick is to find a place you can fall in love with that’ll love you back. |
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Growing up in the 1980s Japanese animation seemed to come out of a much larger cultural matrix: I was excited by Space Battleship Yamato and felt moe for the first time when I saw a pin-up of Lum from Urusei Yatsura and my intuitive understanding of that expanded universe turned out to be right: a written culture that started a bit before the year 1000 when Chinese scholars helped Japanese learn to write down their own legends and myths and brought along a wealth of Chinese and Indian literature and then another flowering when Japan opened up to the west and became the first culture outside the west to attempt to beat us at our own game.
It certainly looks as if it has negotiated a different configuration of the balance between individualism and community. In the US people seem to think you are a bad person if you want life to be cozy. On the other hand, I don't think they'd let me ride the bus as-a-fox in Japan. The police have a ludicrously high conviction rate and we don't know if it because if is they are too tough (torture suspects, in cahoots with the judge) or too lax (don't press charges unless they know if they can win)
Even though nonconformists don't seem to be accepted there, the culture industry proves that they must exist. Here on the other hand I increasingly feel frustrated that our vast inventory of fantasy and science fiction literature (Fred Pohl, Pohl Anderson, Piers Anthony, Alfred Bester, Vernor Vinge, ...) doesn't get visual adaptations but our gatekeeping-industrial complex has never seen a sequel it didn't like (Dune, Dune, Dune, Dune, ...) In Japan on the other hand somebody can make a web novel and then a light novel and then there is a manga and a terribly flawed anime that gets me back to the source material... and I'm hooked!
I don't know if I will ever go. I will never go to Akihabara, I've been there in so many video games that I have a vivid image in all my senses including a feel of how many steps it is up to the elevated platform across to the train station. It's probably all wrong but I wouldn't want to let the real thing ruin the Akiba in my mind.